Hakulomake

KuvA Research Days 2016

The Doctoral Programme at the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki arranges for the second time a public event called Research Days 12th–14th December 2016. During three days the public will have an opportunity to participate in discussions about art and research generated by talks and performances by KuvAs Researchers and Doctoral Students as well as guest speakers they have invited.

Regarding artistic research, art, creativity and benefit are often connected in a very straightforward fashion. The ultimate goal of creative action is thought to be a product of some kind – a work.

On this basis, art and research are more than prone to be seen as part of the market economy and of the utility point of view of creative economy. What goes unnoticed in so doing is the fact that, actually, there are predetermined criteria neither for art nor for research. Their value resides specifically in their ability to provide more profound views beyond apparent foundations and justifications on things yet to come. Inquiry-based art creates prerequisites for a rich future.

The question is, however, not about relative richness, the establishment of which would imply poverty somewhere else. Art research finds elements of richness in the shadow regions of our world that exist even among the most familiar of things. Steering clear from the logic of utility thinking, these resources of creativity cannot be compared with the yet unharnessed natural resources or market areas.

An artist-researcher does not mold materials and topics for utilitarian use but combines them in ways that create new experiences, mental pictures, models of action and insights, often in rather unforeseen ways.

During the Academy of Fine Arts Research Days now organized for the second time, we move in the shadow regions of our familiar world in the framework of four independent thematic sections. Welcome to think about these things together!

Mika Elo

Program

MAANANTAI 12.12.2016 MONDAYImages, Rituals and Notions of Life and Death
13:00-20:00
Host: Petri Kaverma

MONDAY 12.12.2016 Images, Rituals and Notions of Life and Death

MONDAY 12.12.2016 Images, Rituals and Notions of Life and Death

Images, Rituals and Notions of Life and Death

Consciousness of dying is basic human knowledge and death touches each one of us. We talk about and we hear about death every day but still it frightens us. There is always somebody who makes profit out of our fears. We have been force-fed by faceless market forces about eternal youth, better sex, restless consumption and idea of endless development.

This kind of reality has proved to be impossible and intolerable - and even dangerous to life.

Presently, there are no updated images of death in Finnish culture. A dead person has turned into an abstraction, and, thus, our experience of death has lost its meaning. The invisibility of death has made it all the more frightening for us, because we are easily influenced by the messages that visually overloaded environment forces us to adopt. A fearing person is an easy and valuable target for those who want to make influence over his or hers needs or demands.

At the meantime, state’s church message doesn’t speak anymore to secularized people, and they are now seeking new ways to verbalize and frame their experiences at the end of life. How to respond to these kinds of rapidly changing needs that include also questions of immigration and flood of refugees? On a more practical level, what are the ways in which visual artists, designers and researchers could influence visions and notions of death and rituals related to it?

The talk will examine where contemporary death studies has been and is going relative to current trends and ways of thinking. I will also then explore the need to rethink how death, dying, and the dead body are positioned in the current fascination with human mortality.

For a long time, the story goes (and with a strong nod towards Michel Foucault), we twenty-first century humans supported a post-Victorian death-denying culture, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. Thus the image of the late twentieth century/early twenty-first century death-denying prude is emblazoned on our restrained and mute denials of death. So this epic story goes and is repeated on a daily basis. Indeed, it seems far easier to present the death is now denied and repressed thesis while making nostalgic gestures towards the Victorians than actually discussing death. But if everyone is discussing how death is repressed and denied, then aren’t we still talking about death?
A new 21st century approach to death, dying, and the dead body is only possible if we First World Humans reject the denial and repression thesis and come to understand our increasingly technologically mediated mortality. To that end, we need new a language that both sees and sees beyond the spectacular human corpse and articulates how looking at death and seeing dead bodies can be radically disconnected from each other. This newly created discourse and grammar needs to urgently understand the limits of what Lyn Lofland called ‘Thanatogical chic.

In today’s world we face death in its media-saturated form. In this talk I wish to draw attention to three perspectives that shape our present experience of mediatized death; ritual, liminality and immortality. To follow Victor Turner’s idea death invites liminality in which old social order has ceased to exist, but new social order has not yet become to exist. Rituals are a cultural and social means to overcome the phase of liminality and bring new order in life. Immortality is created as an outcome of this process. In this talk I argue that in the present condition, the dynamics between ritual, liminality and immortality need to be re-articulated in the framework of contemporary media logic and related attention economy. We need to ask, how these changes in the dynamics between the three fundamentals shape the value of death in today’s media society.

Our relationship to death is changing. The prevalence of death and dying online has created new ways of understanding those we have lost. This includes the diversification of aesthetics, textures and materials traditionally associated with mortality. Online environments have provided new opportunities for interacting with the dead creating an overwhelming legacy. The question of how we can make meaning from the things left behind explores the entanglement of people with data, documents, traces, things, collections and archives. This develops an understanding of materiality that considers the digital as a unique material, incorporating the affordances of digitality into our experiences of personal collections. It uses crafting, narrative and curation to draw these collections together.

This constructs a range of design lenses that re-consider our experiences of digital collections through: Sherry Turkle’s memory closet, Roland Barthes’ collection of photographs, Edward De Waal’s vitrine of netsuke and Carolyn Steedman’s definition of the archives in contrast to Derrida’s. These lenses construct an approach to digital legacy that is informed by experience, memory and materiality, exploring our relationship to the things we will inherit over the course our lifetimes and the amplification of these through digital data. It views them as collections of interconnected things that act as performative and embodied meaning making devices.

Anthropologist Maija Butters has studied the experiences of dying hospice patients in Helsinki to understand how contemporary Finns are facing death and dying today. In her presentation she will talk about the various kinds of ritualization and creative methods that the terminally ill may use in order to handle their situation and to create metaphysical meaning for the end-of-life and death.

In my dissertation, I am looking at how Finnish hospice patients orient themselves in the context of death and how they make meaning of their end-of-life with different cultural tools, such as language, imagery and rituals. I have conducted ethnography at Terhokoti Hospice Care and the Cancer Clinic of Helsinki University Hospital in 2014–2016, and I have followed over twenty patients’ journeys toward death. In my presentation, I will talk about various kinds of ritualization and other creative methods that the terminally ill use to handle their situation and arrive at metaphysical understandings about it.

When propositional language – medical or religious – struggles to express emotions, experiences and meanings found in the face of death and dying, aesthetics and rituals offer an alternative means of making meaning and sense of the situation. Ritualization, whether done by the medical system or the patient, can be seen both as an attempt to take control over the situation and as a way of reinforcing one’s own understanding of the reality and its implications. Rituals and ritualization may be used for acceptance or avoidance of the approaching death. Personal metaphysical understanding of the challenging existential situation may also happen via aesthetics and aesthetic experiences. Thus, aesthetics may assume the role that religious thinking, imagery and language have traditionally had in creating a meaningful death. Various kinds of aesthetic experiences, induced by nature, music, poetry, etc., may help people to handle complex and ambiguous existential issues and thereby facilitate metaphysical meaning-making.

17:15 Meri Jalonen: The evolution of a package concept through encounters between humans and artefacts

The talk will explore the trajectory of a novel food package, which was an innovation for the industry but a mundane thing for consumers. It will discuss the evolution of the package concept by examining the interactions between its various representations and people involved in its development.

The development of new products for human use is a process that engages various human and non-human actors, artefacts. I have followed the development process of a new package for food products, which was designed as an ecological alternative to conventional packages. However, the hybrid nature of the package complicated its technical development and introduction to the market. It was hybrid in terms of its materiality – a combination of fibre and plastic – and as both an industrial and consumer product. The integration of fibre and plastic required the development of sophisticated manufacturing technology. The adoption of the hybrid package by food companies challenged their conventional understanding of the role of the package in the marketing of food products, while consumers’ preferences and activities were to a large extent unknown to the developers of the package.

The development of the package engaged a large number of human participants and artefacts, whose interaction shaped the trajectory of the package concept. During the concept development process, the package evolved from an abstract idea into prototypes and commercial products. Both the evolution of production practices and accumulating understanding of customers’ requirements clarified the package concept. The analysis highlights the intertwinement of technological, social and economic elements in the development and use of new products, which may challenge existing practices.

18:00–18:30 Terhi Utriainen: Closing remarks

Death and dying are sensitive issues that relate deeply to identity and emotions and that have always been met by such cultural tools as imagination and rituals. The cultural tools with which to encounter death are often also an integral part of cultural heritage; they have frequently been regarded as resistant to change even when other aspects of culture and society are changing quite rapidly. Furthermore, death-related imaginaries and rituals (either religious, secular or, for instance, aesthetic) reflect many key values in societies and thus can be approached as anthropological bridgeheads to the notion of person, relations, social hierarchies and cosmology in the studied culture. This has been done in several ways in archeological, historical, anthropological and sociological research.

When rituals and other cultural tools related to death change, this may be an indication of profound and far-reaching cultural transformation. Globalization, marketization, medicalization, mediatization, as well as secularization combined with renewed interest in religion, are some overlapping aspects of the present-day social and cultural change. What precisely these processes mean to cultures of death and dying is still not thoroughly researched. I maintain that we should explore the emerging imaginations and ritualizations around death and dying from creative, interdisciplinary and multi-modal ways in order to understand how we now understand life and its limits.

19:00–20:00 Screening: Exitus. Minna Havukainen ja Johanna Frigård.

In her art photographer Minna Havukainen has been dealing with the great turning points in life: birth, illness and death. Exhibition called Exitus consists of photographs and videos picturing processes of burial and cremation. She has photographed portraits of grieving relatives, details of dead people placed in a coffin and other details connected to the burial ceremonies. The main motivation for the exhibition was a need to bring death into range of vision, give it visual form so that people could confront their mortality more openly. Exitus was exhibited in Turku 2009, in Kuopio 2010 and in Jyväskylä 2012.

In addition to the photographs and videos Exitus expanded outside the gallery walls. Havukainen contacted the mourning relatives on a very intimate level, but she also got to know a large variety of people working in different professions. The multi-professional networking was needed when arranging various happenings on the All Saints Day. Series of lectures and musical performances were arranged in co-operation with the church, and the public could visit crematory and hear the crematory workers tell about their work. Florist students prepared personal memorial flower arrangements that were laid on an imaginary burial mound in public environment. People were free to take part to the “burial ceremonies” and it was possible to light a candle – for the remembrance of mortality of one self or for someone already passed on.

The imaginary burial mound could be visited the whole exhibition period. It formed an important extension to the public domain: people walking by could easily stop and wonder the grave without the need to step into an art gallery. In that way death became visible also in the ordinary social environment.

* * *
On display in the Exhibition Laboratory gallery during the Research Days are parts of on Minna Havukainens work “Exitus” as well as some photographic works:

Minna Havukainen:”The diversity of human life has been the starting point of my art. In my work, I have tried to get as close as possible to life’s turning points, the moments in which being human is concentrated. Birth, sickness and death touch everybody’s life. That is why I have felt that it is important to tackle these topics and to put them on view. At the same time, the experience of a single individual has become a common and shared one. The Exitus exhibition displays extracts from moments experienced with grieving relatives. Sharing an encounter with death and coming to a halt with others when it happens has been one of the most important experiences of my work. Together, we may be a little readier to face our own mortality”.

TUESDAY 13.12.2016 Ecologies of Artistic Research

TUESDAY 13.12.2016 Ecologies of Artistic Research

Tuula Närhinen: Water Colour Scope (2012)

Ecologies of Artistic Research

Artistic research contributes significantly to the on-going fundamental reconsiderations of aesthetics and epistemology. In the current situation, where ‘anthropocene’ with all its implications has become a widely discussed topic, aesthetic phenomena do not constitute any longer a matter of subject-centred reflection only. Aesthetics is discussed as one of the key domains, where the conditions determining how things in the world become perceptible, knowable and controllable to human beings are at stake. Questions of whether and how there is an aesthetic moment inherent to all knowledge production have been raised. The phenomenal embeddedness of human intellectual, sensuous and affective capacities has already over a longer period of time been emphasized both by phenomenological and pragmatist traditions.

Today, the double-bind between aisthesis and noesis, i.e. the processes of sense experience and knowledge production, constitutes a research problem addressed in many research areas, such as digital humanities, science studies, media philosophy and cognitive science. On a more general culture theoretical level, the erosion of human-centred worldview finds its parallel in an ecologization of knowledge, i.e. in recognition of the fact that knowledge is produced in complex circumstances where non-human actors play an important role. In this situation, topics such as non-propositional knowledge, non-verbal epistemic practices, aesthetic thinking, phenomenotechnics and visual narration re-emerge as central concerns of artistic research.

Program

09:00 Coffee

09:30 Mika Elo: Introduction

10:00 Tuula Närhinen:Phenomenotechnique in Visual Art Practise.A hands-on approach towards embodied epistemologies
This talk looks for the epistemic in the making of pictorial representations. Re-adapting instruments derived from natural science I reach out to nature in order to grasp the unfurling of a world invisible to the naked eye. My project considers the role of various inscribing apparatuses in a process that allows natural phenomena to manifest themselves.

11:00 Michael Schwab:Experimental Systems: Contemporaneity, Untimeliness and Artistic Research
Appropriating Hans-Jörg Rheinberber’s work on ‘Experimental Systems,’ the presentation will make links to theories of contemporary art. It will suggest a possible departure of artistic research from contemporary art by deploying Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘untimely’ against the famous claim made by Roland Barthes, who (inspired by Nietzsche, and quoted by Agamben) said that “the contemporary is the untimely.”

12:00 Lunch

13:00 Dieter Mersch:Art and Non-propositional Thinking
The lecture will reflect upon ‘art’ and ‘knowledge’ from a philosophical point of view; the question which I would like to raise up is, in which way – that means: based on which practices – does art produce knowledge and what kind of knowledge is produced by artistic practices in relation to science. After three decades of aesthetic thinking about art in the realm of ‘aesthetic experience’ during the 1980ies and early 1990ies (at least in Germany, where art was solely construed under the notions of reception and interpretation), it seems time again to pose the question on the particular ‘logic’ and ‘structure’ of artistic production into the forefront again and hence to understand art as a cognition in itself, which also hints at the old question about the relationship between art and truth as it was widely discussed especially during the era of German enlightenment. The claim of art as a cognition of its own also includes the assertion of an exclusive agency or mode of representation, a language of its own that could be considered as non-propositional way of thinking.

14:30 Coffee

15:00 Miika Luoto: Aesthetic judgement and the exigencies of thinking

16:00 Eija-Liisa Ahtila:Studies on the Ecologies of Drama

"How to depict living things? How to approach them? How to convey a different way of being, another being's world? How to make it into a continuous event that becomes part of our idea of reality?" The talk will look at the questions of presentation, mediation as well as visual recording and its function in our reality in the work Studies on the Ecology of Drama (2014).

17:00 Annette Arlander: Closing remarks

WEDNESDAY 14.12.2016 Particles

WEDNESDAY 14.12.2016 Particles

Maija Närhinen: River / detail

Particles

In all kinds of work classification and sorting and organising of material is present usually all the way through the process starting from the very beginning. For example, managing information is a task of organising and collecting the ever growing amount of bits and pieces, as we constantly have access to more information.

In fine arts the method of making three-dimensional works or installations is often one of combining or taking apart elements originating from different sources. The Particles symposium will examine combining and deconstruction as artistic practices.

Making a work of art may mean reorganising what already exists, for example existing objects. What are the classifications that visual artists apply in their work, and how do they apply them? How are orders, systems or rules formed? What are the artistic aims and potentials of creating work by compiling or disassembling? A work often acquires its form and appearance as a result of the separation or combination of elements; how do the processes of combining and dismantling themselves contribute to the content of an artwork?

When the distances between the elements or materials of the work are increased or decreased the material undergoes a change. New location and decontextualisation alter material’s meaning and character. Even when a work is made by combining elements, something is always deconstructed – what shifts is the 'identity’ of the material. How do materials function and how are they altered by reorganisation?

Program

09:30 Coffee

10:00 Maija Närhinen: Introduction

10:20 Martta Heikkilä: À fleur de peau: Of Blossoming Surfaces in Maija Närhinen's Work
This paper will begin from Maija Närhinen’s sculpture Kukka (“Flower”, 2015) and its qualities as a work which is essentially about its surface. In the light of Marcel Duchamp’s notion of “infrathin”, or the barely discernible, untouchable limit of perception, I shall look at Kukka’s ways of being an artistic presentation. In its overwhelming scale and abundance of details, it remains on the limit of form and the formless, the multiple and the unified, infinite locality of colours and their universal noise.

11:00 Saara Hacklin:Rock, Paper, Scissors: Material, representation and perception
Maija Närhinen’s Shore (2008) seems to consist of rocks arranged on the wall, almost as a shoreline. On closer inspection they turn out to be meticulously executed watercolour paintings – rock has dissolved into water and paper. In River (2015) cut-outs of small blue lines forms together a cascading river. Närhinen's oeuvre create tensions between the materiality, representation and our perception.

11:40 Lunch

12:40 Tuomas Nevanlinna: Parts outside the whole

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that “a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism” (Philosophical Investigations, 271). The proposition may appear self-evident but it can also be related to as a thought-inducing provocation. Are there parts that somehow do not belong to the whole? Parts that are not subject to the same laws as other parts but are parts nonetheless? What kind of logic applies to this kind of extimate (as opposed to intimate) parts?

13:10 Jouni Kaipia: On Primary Images in Architecture
We can take a building apart piece by piece and painstakingly label the parts. Still, we wouldn’t be able to tell what constitutes architecture. Behind the tangible building components, the true brick and mortar of an architectural experience may be found in mental images that this encounter arouses in our minds, at best enabling us to surrender to a more intimate relationship with the world.

13:40 Closing remarks

WEDNESDAY 14.12.2016 Poetic Archeology presents: Deutsches Lager – On the Relationship Between Artistic and Archeological Research

WEDNESDAY 14.12.2016 Poetic Archeology presents: Deutsches Lager – On the Relationship Between Artistic and Archeological Research

Photo: Japo Knuutila

Poetic Archeology presents: Deutsches Lager – On the Relationship Between Artistic and Archeological Research

The Tulliniemi peninsula in Hanko was the point of arrival at which German troops began their transit through Finland from 1942–1944. Having been closed since World War II, the area attracted public attention in 2014 when the City of Hanko opened a nature trail there, next to which partly forgotten German barracks of the transit camp were discovered. The camp had at one point comprised around a hundred buildings, and over the years hundreds of thousands of soldiers had stayed there on their way to fight up north or to go on leave to Germany. Most of the extensive infrastructure was demolished during the past few decades because of extensions needed for the port of Hanko. A few of the buildings remain standing, however, and the topsoil contains a great number of objects left behind by the Germans. The Deutsches Lager Project will incorporate works that depict and examine in various ways the camp and the soldiers and their relatives who passed through the camp. It will also involve a more general investigation of the cultural significance of camps as a social paradigm.

The research activities of the Poetic Archeology group (Jan Kaila, Japo Knuutila, Jan Fast) are founded on the methodology of artistic research and on the principles of archeology. The term ‘poetic’ refers to that quality of the group’s activities which is designed to awaken association and memories, partly through aesthetics (the use of color, light, motion, form, etc.), partly through the use of different media (moving images, photography, text, objects) in flexible configurations. The project both resembles archeology and is archeology – it effectively excavates history both physically (objects and texts) and visually (photographs and moving images). The visualizations of the Deutsches Lager Project are processed by artistic researchers Kaila and Knuutila, both affiliated with University of the Arts Helsinki, while Fast, archeologist and PhD student at the University of Helsinki, is responsible for scientific excavation and archival research.

Art and archeology have long and close historical relations, but the current situation has not attracted much attention. The methodologies of contemporary art often bear a resemblance to archeology: artists ‘dig’ in places such as archives, historical museums or flea markets. Current archeology, on the other hand, seems to be akin to contemporary art in that it is a complex and multilayered discipline which investigates not only ancient historical past but recent phenomena as well. The sub-disciplines of archeology have also evolved and broadened. One of the important ‘newcomers’ is conflict archeology which, as its name suggests, investigates conflicts such as World War II. In that it deals with events that have a huge impact on our thinking to this day, conflict archeology has of course a dramatic political potential. This is exactly what Poetic Archeology is interested in.

PROGRAM

14:00 Coffee

14:15 Jan Kaila and Japo Knuutila:Introduction

14.45 Jan Fast: The Conflict Archaeology of "Deutsches Lager Hanko"

Cape Hanko, the southernmost part of Finland, is first mentioned in written sources already in the middle of the 13th century. Due to its location it can be considered the strategic southern corner of Finland. During it´s history Hanko has played an important role especially as a harbour, but also as a war zone in the beginning of “Operation Barbarossa” Hitler´s attack on the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1942 Organisation Todt started building a large transition camp on Cape Tulliniemi in Hanko.

After taking a close at the WW2 history and sites of Hanko in 2014 it became clear to me that the area most important to document and to research was the area of the German Second World War transition camp. The history of the large camp had been almost totally neglected in previous research and its importance for the German war in the North left untold. The possibilities of combining archaeological research with archive material to tell the camp´s history seemed very promising from the start.

The first archaeological surveys carried out in the area by me in 2014 and early 2015 revealed that many areas of the German transition camp had survived the enormous expansion of the Freeport of Finland, after the Second World War. Later trial excavations and metal detecting surveys revealed several promising areas of excavation in at least four different parts of the camp.

During the field seasons of 2015 and 2016 the locations of large and previously unknown German WWII dumps were found in the westernmost part of the camp. The systematic trial excavations of these areas have revealed totally untouched find contexts with a large array of different finds and features shedding light on the daily activities in the camp from 1942 to 1944.

In this presentation I give an overview of the development of the archaeological sub-discipline of conflict archaeology, focusing on how it has come about, and the value of studying the material remains of past conflicts. I also discuss the even more recent interest within cultural heritage studies in so-called “dark” heritage, and the ways in which this overlaps with conflict archaeology.

The challenging and potentially upsetting nature of these related areas of study present many ethical questions for the researcher: to what extent is it acceptable to delve into what might be deeply disturbing life histories and memories (in the instance of events within living memory)? Is an archaeological site connected to conflict an appropriate forum for public participation? What are the responsibilities of the investigator? And how should memory institutions such as museums deal with the tangible and intangible heritage related to conflicts? In my presentation I draw upon my own research in Finnish Lapland, as well as on examples from across the globe.

16:15 Ian Alden Russell:The Art of the Past: Before and after Archaeology

With intellectual and disciplinary roots in art history, early modern science, and antiquarianism, the field of archaeology exists within the arts, humanities, and sciences. As with their antiquarian forebears whose work to compose images of the past slipped easily from art to science and back again, contemporary archaeologists compose pasts from traces, residues, absences, and presences appropriating, mixing, and inventing techniques and methods from across the academy.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, there has been a resurgence of interest in the composition of the past within contemporary arts practice. With some artists focusing directly on archaeology and the act of excavation and processing of finds in particular, some archaeologists, such as Colin Renfrew, Ruth Tringham, Michael Shanks, and Doug Bailey, have endeavored to meet this interest within the arts, sustaining critical, interdisciplinary work on the renewal of the past through both archaeological as well as artistic practices. In many cases, archaeologists themselves have transgressed disciplinary strictures engaging artists directly through residencies and commissions and in some cases taking to making art themselves.

Collectively, there is evidence of a concerted effort within both archaeology and art to address the composition of the past—not as an end result of technological analysis but as the beginning of a possibility for renewal through process. Doing away with the rubric of a scientifically managed past, perhaps we may be witnessing a revival of an avant-gardist past, akin to the predisciplinary spirit of antiquarianism, that is not confined by disciplinary strictures or epistemic conventions, where the past is not a destination but a continual process of composition and renewal.

17:00–17:30 Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen:Closing remarks and discussion

Speaker bios

Speaker bios

MONDAY 12.12.2016 Images, Rituals and Notions of Life and Death

Postdoctoral researcher Petri Kaverma has worked as visual artist over 30 years. He is unbiased in the choice of media for his work but mostly he has worked into rather narrow and specialized area of conceptual arts. Kaverma has taught in several art schools; he has curated exhibitions and organised visual art and environmental art projects both in Finland and abroad. He graduated as Doctor of Fine Arts in the year 2012 and his doctoral thesis handled about the silence and disturbance of art, what kind of disturbances art causes in the environment. At the moment he runs an artistic research project that explores cultural and visual aspects of dying. The project seeks new solutions to encounter the audience and to work as an artist and researcher in the delicate area of death.

Dr. John Troyer is the Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath and Associate Professor of Sociology. His interdisciplinary research focuses on contemporary memorialization practices, concepts of spatial historiography, and the dead body’s relationship with technology. Dr. Troyer is also a theatre director and installation artist with extensive experience in site-specific performance across the United States and Europe. He is a co-founder of the Death Reference Desk website, the Future Cemetery Project and a frequent commentator for the BBC. His forthcoming book, Technologies of the Human Corpse (published by The MIT Press), will appear in 2017. His father, Ronald Troyer, is an American Funeral Director.

Johanna Sumiala is Adjunct Professor (Docent) and University Lecturer in the Department of Social Research/Media and Communication studies at the University of Helsinki. Her special fields include media sociology and media anthropology. Sumiala has authored and co-authored several books, articles and special issues on the topics of media, death and ritual both in English and in Finnish. She is currently writing a new book on "Media Society. The Social Life of Public Death in Ritual Events" (Routledge, 2017).

Stacey Pitsillides is a Lecturer in Design in the Department of Creative Professions and Digital Arts at the University of Greenwich whose research explores death and digitality. She is also a PhD candidate in Design at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her PhD considers creative responses to legacy framed through what happens to our data and possessions after we die? As part of her research she is on the Committee for the International Death Online Research Symposium and has been the co-facilitator of three unconference events discussing issues of death and digitality. These unconferences stimulated the creation of the Digital Death mailing network, which has grown to over 200 members within a growing interdisciplinary community of academics, industry leaders and public stakeholders.

Maija Butters is a cultural anthropologist and doctoral candidate in the Science of Religions at Helsinki University. Previously she has written on Tibetan Buddhist art. Her dissertation study “Personal landscapes of death in Finland” focuses on the experiences of hospice patients. She is especially interested in the imageries of modern death and dying.

Meri Jalonen, D.Sc. (Tech.), is a visiting scholar in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Aalto University. Her dissertation discussed interdependencies between the development of products, production technology and production practices in the innovation process with a focus on sociomaterial practices. Her current research interests concern the contributions of experiments to sustainability transformation processes and the ways in which interaction of multiple practices shape the unfolding of innovation processes.

Terhi Utriainen is acting Professor in the Study of Religions at the University of Helsinki as well as Adjunct Professor (Docent) in Gender Studies. Her research and teaching interests include ethnography of lived religion, gender and embodiment, ritual studies, death, dying and suffering. She is co-editor of Post-Secular Society (Transaction Publishers 2012), Between Ancestors and Angels: Finnish Women Making Religion (Palgrave McMillan 2014) as well as the forthcoming volume The RelationalDynamics of Enchantment and Sacralization: Changing the Terms of the Religion versus Secularity Debate (Equinox 2016).

Johanna Frigård is an art historian (PhD) specialiced in photography history in Finland. At the moment she is working as a researcher and a university lecturer in Turku University, but in 2010 she participated Exitus in Kuopio as the executive director of VB Photographic Centre.

Minna Havukainen is a photography artist living and working in Turku Finland. Between 2003–2014 birth, illness and death have been central themes in her work. Living in-between, acceptance of irreversible changes in life and meeting with death eye to eye have been given a visual form in her works that aim to give shape to death from the perspective of close relatives. Photography and video exhibition Exitus along with a happening called On the Earth, In the Heavens on the All Saint's Day in 2009 in Turku, in 2010 in Kuopio and in 2012 in Jyväskylä gave audience a possibility to share their thoughts on death with others.

TUESDAY 13.12.2016Ecologies of Artistic Research

Mika Elo is professor of artistic research and head of doctoral programme at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (KuvA). His research areas are visual culture, media aesthetics and artistic research. He is participating in the discussions of these areas in the capacity of curator, artist and researcher.

Tuula Närhinen is a visual artist based in Helsinki, Finland. Närhinen is a graduate of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki (MFA), and the University of Technology (M.Sc. in Architecture). She has recently accomplished a practice-led doctoral degree (DFA) at the University of the Arts.

Dr. Michael Schwab is a London-based post-conceptual artist and artistic researcher. He is visiting professor of artistic research at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, as well as research fellow at the Zurich University of the Arts, the Orpheus Institute, Ghent and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He is co-initiator and inaugural Editor-in-Chief of JAR, Journal for Artistic Research, senior researcher in the ERC funded research project ‘MusicExperiment21’ and joint project leader of ‘Transpositions: Artistic Data Exploration’ funded by the Austrian Science Fund.

Dieter Mersch, Prof. Dr., University of the Arts Zürich: Study of mathematics and philosophy at the Universities of Cologne and Bochum. Dissertation and habilitation at Technical University Darmstadt in Philosophy. 2004-13 Full Professor of Media Theory and Director of the Department for ‘Media and Arts’ at the University of Potsdam. Since 2013 Director of the Institute for Critical Theory at Zurich University of the Arts Switzerland. Main publications: Was sich zeigt. Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis, München 2002, Ereignis und Aura. Untersuchungen zur einer Ästhetik des Performativen, Frankfurt/M 2002, Medientheorien zur Einführung, Hamburg 2006, Posthermeneutik, Berlin 2010, Epistemologies of Aesthetics, Zürich/Berlin 2015.

Miika Luoto is a philosopher specialized in aesthetics. His research has focused on phenomenological and post-phenomenological thought. Luoto teaches currently at the University of Arts, Helsinki.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila is an artist and filmmaker. She works with moving image making spatial multiple screen installations and short films. Her works have been exhibited in museums and biennales (eg.Tate Modern; Moma NYC; Mori Art Museum; Documenta, Kassel; Sao Paulo Biennale) and in the film festivals around the world (eg. Berlin, Sundance, Venice). She studies at the KuVa Doctoral program. The starting point of her works and research is the eco-cinematic questions: how and with what kind of technology, drama and expressive devices can the image of our world be built in the present moment of ecological crisis.

Annette Arlander is an artist, researcher and a pedagogue, one of the pioneers of Finnish performance art and a trailblazer of artistic research. At present she is professor of artistic research at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki and PI of the Academy of Finland funded research project How to do things with performance. Her research interests include artistic research, performance-as-research and the environment. Her artwork involves performing landscape by means of video or recorded voice, moving between performance art, video and environmental art. For publications see her website.

WEDNESDAY 14.12.2016Particles

Maija Närhinen is a visual artist who lives and works in Helsinki. She holds an MA-degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki and is currently a doctoral candidate there. Her sculptural installations are constructed of for example two-dimensional images and they deal with questions of depicting and representation. Her main material has been paper, which she uses in different ways in her three-dimensional works. She has exhibited internationally and in Finland (recently among others: Skulptur, contemporary sculpture from the Nordic countries, RBS-galleries, London, Turku Biennial 2015, Ars Nova Museum, Turku, Experimentality, Research Pavilion, Venice, Reality Bites – Document in Contemporary Art, Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki). See her website.

Martta Heikkilä, PhD, is a researcher of Aesthetics at the University of Helsinki. She teaches philosophy of art and art criticism at the University of Helsinki and the University of the Arts Helsinki. She is specialised in phenomenology and contemporary French philosophy. Her publications include both academic articles and writings in the context of contemporary art.

Saara Hacklin has studied at the University of Helsinki. Her PhD thesis (2012) discussed Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of art, bringing it together with contemporary art. She has worked as a curator in different projects, most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. In addition, she has been teaching art theory in different institutions, such as Aalto University, and writing art criticism and essays for various publications.

Tuomas Nevanlinna is a writer and a translator into Finnish who lives in Helsinki. He has also taught a lot in the Academy of Fine Arts among others. Books published by Nevanlinna include Hyväkuntoisena taivaaseen (”Going to Heaven in Good Shape”, Tammi, 1999), Kuninkaista ja narreista (“Of Kings and Fools”, Kirjapaja, 2004), Nurin oikein (“Purl and Plain”, Teos, 2006) and Uskon sanat (“Words of Faith”, together with Jukka Relander, Teos, 2011). Books translated into Finnish by Nevanlinna include The BFG by Roald Dahl (Art House, 1989) and Alice in Wonderland (Otava, 2000).

Jouni Kaipia is a Helsinki based architect and photographer. He is occupied with a wide range of visual expression. He travels the world observing and documenting the vanishing diversity and beauty of human habitats and ponders how to dwell on this globe. He has had his own design practice since 1987. On the side, he has been teaching in a number of architecture schools in several countries.

WEDNESDAY 14.12.2016
Poetic Archeology presents: Deutsches Lager – On the Relationship Between Artistic and Archeological Research

Jan Kaila studied at the Doctoral Program at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts from 1997 to 2002 and got his Doctorate in Fine Arts (DFA) in 2002. Kaila was in 2004 appointed Professor of Artistic Research at FAFA. In 2008, he was elected Vice Rector of the Academy. Kaila has worked as a lecturer and as an evaluator of fine art education in several European countries. In 2004 he was a founding members of European Artistic Research Network. Kaila has held one-man exhibitions and participated in group shows in various European countries, the United States, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Since 2014 Kaila works as Scientific Advisor in Artistic Research at the Swedish Research Council and as a Visiting Researcher at Helsinki Art University leading the project Poetic Archeology.

Japo Knuutila lives and works in Kirkkonummi, Finland. Japo Knuutila has graduated from University of Art and Design Helsinki 1982. Japo Knuutila is a photographer and writer. He works in a variety of media, including video and photography. During the last 25 years his work has reflected an interest in how inherited cultural languages shape our experiences, our memories, desires and self-images. Landscape has been a reoccurring theme in his artwork as well. Since 1987 he has been teaching and lecturing in University of Art and Design Helsinki, Turku University of applied scienses. Metropolia University of applied scienses, Lahti University of applied scienses.

Jan Fast is a Finish archaeologist (MA) and exhibition coordinator. He has studied archaeology and history at the University of Helsinki, the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi. At the moment Fast is working on his doctoral dissertation about the archaeology and history large German, Second World War transition camp situated at Cape Tulliniemi, Hanko S. Finland. Jan Fast has conducted some 150 archaeological excavations in Finland since his start as a field archaeologist in 1986. During his long career as a field archaeologist career he has worked at several different science institutions. While working as an exhibition coordinator at Heureka, The Finnish Science Centre 1989-1997 he organized the famous archaeological excavations of the large Neolithic dwelling site in Vantaa Jokiniemi. Some five hundred people participated in what still is considered the largest community archaeology dig in Finland.

Suzie Thomas, PhD, is university lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of Helsinki. She is a member of the research team for “Lapland’s Dark Heritage” (http://blogs.helsinki.fi/lapland-dark-heritage/), an Academy of Finland-funded project which studies the material legacy of the Second World War in northern Finland. Suzie received her PhD in Heritage Studies from Newcastle University, UK, and is Co-Editor of the Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage.

Ian Alden Russell is a contemporary art curator. Currently the Curator of Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery, he was previously Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Curatorial Practice at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, and Fellow in Public Art and Cultural Heritage in the Public Humanities Program at Brown University. Recent notable projects include guest curator for Artpace San Antonio’s 2015 International-Artist-in-Residency program, An Innocent City—a response to Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, and the Hong Kong Umbrella Festival responding to the 2014 Hong Kong Demonstrations. Upcoming projects include exhibitions with Kurdish-Turkish artist Fatma Bucak, Pierre Huyghe’s film Untitled/Human Mask, and Houston-based artist Gabriel Martinez. He holds a PhD in History and Archaeology from Trinity College Dublin, and currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen is professor of sociology at the University of Tampere since 2012. His previous appointments include the posts as fellow (2005-2009; 2012-2014) and as the deputy director (2013-2014) at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and as professor of sociology at the University of Helsinki (2009-2012).